Deciding on the programming language for your next embedded product may not be as simple as just choosing C. While C has been the industry's go-to workhorse for the past 50 years, its features and capabilities dramatically lag modern languages like C++ and Rust. As a result, I’ve witnessed many teams transitioning from C to C++; however, could there be a place for Rust?

Whether you are zealous about adopting Rust for embedded systems or simply curious about the language, there are five tips you can follow to help you get up to speed and understand whether Rust is suitable for your projects.

Tip #1 – Read the Rust Books

The Rust community has been fantastic about creating learning materials for the software community and making them readily available. However, if you don’t know anything about Rust, there are several resources that I would recommend you check out.

I would also recommend that you check out the Embedded Rust Documentation. The community regularly updates these resources and is an excellent source of knowledge.

Tip #2 – Get Hands-on With a Project

The best way to learn a programming language is to get hands-on and make something real. Therefore, if you are serious about trying out Rust for embedded, you need to consider a project you are interested in and try to build. Of course, I’m not saying you must invest all your weekends and create a product you will take to market. However, a simple hobby project can do.

For years, I’ve used a weather station as my technological tryout. If you go back through my courses, blogs, and content, you’ll discover that I’ve built weather stations:

I’m not overly passionate about the weather; I just have found that once I built a weather station, I understood the concepts and hardware. Making it again in different languages on slightly different hardware helps me to:

Find something simple that interests you, and then learn Rust by building it!

Tip #3 – Attend Design News's Rust CEC Course

Formal training can help you learn a language much quicker. You can learn from an instructor of the best practices, what to do, what not to do, and so forth. Design News has its Digikey Continuing Education Center (CEC), which has a ton of great courses. One upcoming course is entitled Rust for Embedded, and the speaker will be yours truly. The course will run from February 28 – March 3rd, 2023. The recordings will be available in the archive afterward, but you might want to consider attending live so that you can ask questions.

Tip #4 – Leverage CoPilot to Accelerate Learning

An exciting environment to learn Rust is Visual Studio Code (VSC). VSC has a GitHub Copilot extension that can suggest and help autocomplete code. If you download the Rust extension, it also provides an excellent resource for you to see the Rust code.

The following is an example of a simple Rust application that I wrote to print “Hello World,” read in 10 characters, and then print them to the terminal:

// Rust main function

fn main() {

    println!("Hello, world!");

    // Rust array with 10 elements initialized to 0

    let mut a = [0; 10];

    // Read characters from keyboard in a

    for i in 0..10 {

        a[i] = read!();

    }

    // Print array

    for i in 0..10 {

        print!("{} ", a[i]);

    }

}

Let me be clear: the only code I wrote was the comments. Based on my comments, Copilot generated or recommended the code that came after. It’s a simple, trivial example, but I think you can see the power of such a technique!

Tip #5 – Use ChatGPT to Improve Your Code

The code that GitHub Copilot generated was pretty cool. It helps you to write working code. However, was that code it generated the best to use? Did it fit with Rust's idiomatic syntax? Would an experienced Rust developer cringe at the code we just wrote? Possibly. So how might we improve it if we don’t understand the language?

Another way to improve your code is to ask ChatGPT to improve it or to use the open AI auto code completion playground. When I asked the AI model, “Can you improve the following Rust code to be more Rust idiomatic?” it responded with the following:

// Improved version

fn main() {

    println!("Hello, world!");

    let mut a: [i32; 10] = [0; 10];

    for i in 0..10 {

        a[i] = read_input().unwrap_or(0);

    }

    for i in 0..10 {

        print!("{} ", a[i]);

    }

}

fn read_input() -> Result {

    let mut input = String::new();

    std::io::stdin().read_line(&mut input)?;

    input.trim().parse()

}

We can see that this code now reads in a string and parses and will return an error if one is generated. If you were new to Rust, you’d discover some new syntax and libraries to help make life easier.      

Conclusions

Rust is an exciting language. It may one day become the dominant embedded programming language or become an alternative option to C/C++. There are many ways to learn Rust between books, hands-on projects, courses, and even leveraging AI models to guide you. As a system language, Rust appears to have an eye on embedded development. Whether it will come to dominate the industry is yet to be seen. Either way, I believe you’ll find that Rust is an interesting language worth learning. Whether you adopt it as your go-to language, only time will tell.